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Property tax, sometimes referred to as "Rent", is paid by shoppe and stall owners to the fort or palace on a weekly basis. Some of it is lost as a PoE sink, and some goes to the island coffers for use by the governing flag. The tax that goes to the island government is expressed as a percentage of the tax baseline and increases the overall property tax paid. These additional taxes can be as high as 50% (for an island with a fort) or 100% (for a palace). If, for some reason, a colonized island has no fort or palace, only the baseline tax is paid. When taxes are set to 0% by the governor, no PoE is placed into the island coffers. However, if set above 0%, everything above the tax baseline is put into the island coffers.

Tax baseline observed on a large island with over 250 population and 0% tax rate. At population 250 and below, tax rate decreases linearly from the above values down to 1/4 the above values at zero population.

Sales tax is paid when using the ordering interface of a shoppe or stall. Dockside transactions are not taxed, but if a manager orders goods from a shop to sell dockside (a common practice for producers of ship consumables), the sales tax is paid at the time the order is placed. Sales tax is calculated by taking the tax value of the goods and labor used in the creation of the product. The governor's tax slider does not affect the calculation of the sales tax. 90% of the sales tax collected is sunk, while the remaining 10% goes to the palace coffers, none of it goes to the shopkeeper.. The amount deposited into the coffers is not recorded in the palace and fort records.

Tax value is an element of the sales tax which reflects a standardized price for the tax to be calculated off of. Each commodity (including the three different types of labor) has its own tax value, and the tax cost of a finished product is the sum of the tax values of its ingredients.

The primary effect of this, and the reason the system was changed to be this way, is to make the price of an item the same, no matter where it is produced or purchased from. In particular, this stops shoppekeepers from closing their shoppes to the public, setting the order costs to the minimum, and then ordering goods to sell dockside without paying any sales tax.

The tax values for each commodity is changed dynamically by the system, and drives the dynamic spawn of commodities. The current tax values can be found on the "manage prices" menu of the shoppe management menu or it can be found via yoweb lookups.